


The Hour is None

by tempus_teapot (dreadnot)



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Angst, D/s, M/M, h/c, kmeme
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-02-12
Updated: 2012-03-02
Packaged: 2017-10-30 23:58:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/337646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreadnot/pseuds/tempus_teapot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With a knife scar in his back, the Chantry in ruins, Hawke on the Viscount's throne, and Fenris as his dubious keeper, Anders works just to pull himself together and endure while there are questions to be answered about why he's alive and what Hawke is planning next.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1 - 10

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in response to a [kink meme prompt](http://dragonage-kink.livejournal.com/8469.html?thread=31882517#t31882517):
>
>> I'd like to see a broken Anders, maybe after the end game when Hawke had gone off with his love interest, perhaps Anders' clinic has been destroyed, his cats are all gone, Justice has left, etc., so he feels like he has no purpose or reason to live. He goes to Fenris and basically acts like a submissive to him, needing someone to tell him what to do. Would like a d/s aspect, although not something where Fenris is overtly cruel, just giving Anders what he needs.

**I.**  
“When the moon is down and the hour is none.” – Stephen King, _Lisey’s Story_  
  
When the moon is down and the hours is none Anders rises from the blood-soaked ground and turns his face toward the Gallows where smoke billows and muffled whumps – explosions wrought by either magic or alchemy – make their way across the harbor to the city proper.  
  
Anders stands staring blankly across the harbor. He should feel something, some sense of anger or excitement or fear… something. All he feels is empty. Justice’s last words haunt him from the time ( _the hour is none_ ) when they existed somewhere in the non-existence where they were neither on this side of the Veil or the other, _I see it._ That’s all. _I see it,_ a flare of hope, then the Veil took Justice from him and thrust Anders back into the body they had shared for more than a decade.  
  
His absence leaves Anders empty, and it’s only now that he realizes how much of who he had become was because of Justice, or because of Vengeance.  
  
Why is he even alive when he can still feel the ache of a wound in his back that _he_ didn’t heal? He’s done what he planned – or what Vengeance planned, the distinction is moot. He’s sacrificed everything, every connection, every tie, every friend, even his own life, and what does he have to show for it?  
  
Nothing. He has nothing.  
  
The whumps come more slowly now, like a violent storm that is moving on, letting the slowly emerging sun pick out the wreckage it leaves in its wake even while on the horizon is the fleeting flare of lightning and ( _one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand, wait and listen until it comes)_ the ever more distant rumble of thunder.  
  
Anders stands there, watching the Gallows long after all sounds of strife fade into _(nothing, nothing left, nothing at all)_ the silence of a city dumbstruck by the precipice that has opened under its feet.  
  
Anders leapt.  
  
He leapt and the only flying he has done is the false flight of an endless free fall while he knows that the bottom still waits for him.  
  
The bottom isn’t betraying his friends.  
  
The bottom isn’t the sharp pain of a knife in his back.  
  
The bottom isn’t knowing that the man he ( _loved him,_ loved _him, wanted him every night, ached for him)_ respected has taken a path that just hours ago he would have found despicable. He has nothing left with which _to_ despise.  
  
The bottom isn’t on Kirkwall’s streets, when unthinking back-brained habit has his feet retracing familiar routes where more often than not the people he passes are bloody stains on the ground, and the few living souls he sees are wide-eyed and flinching.  
  
He has a moment in Darktown when he thinks that he’s found the bottom, when he takes the last flight of stairs up to his clinic and sees the doors in splinters and the angry light of fire dancing inside the closest thing he’s had to a home that was his and his alone.  
  
Distantly, he thinks this should be worthy of tears or anger or even fear, but he feels as hollow as a harvest gourd at midsummer. _(Shake me and hear the rattle.)_  
  
He stays there at the top of the stairs and lets the visions of dancing flames and _(how many people did I kill?)_ red light fills the empty space where his heart once beat.  
  
It’s there that they find him.  
  
  
  
 **II.**  
He’s sitting with his back against the railing across from his clinic watching everything burn. He thinks with a distant kind of bemusement that it should hurt to watch his few possessions and a decade’s work go up in flames, but it doesn’t _(a pillow, thrust into his hand as the templars take him away, her face twisted with the effort of not wailing until her son is out of sight, if not out of earshot)_ affect him in any way he can understand. There is something like black water filling the hollow where his soul used to be, and he thinks that perhaps there is pain under there waiting for the water to recede and expose it. Maybe the pain will drown down there and the place where he used to hold hope and hate, happiness and despair can just become a sunken graveyard of dead emotions.  
  
He doesn’t know when he draws his knees up to his chest and hugs them any more than he knows how long he sits there in Darktown’s constant twilight, but he eventually _(the hour is none)_ hears a sharp intake of breath and only has to shift his eyes to see a pair of bare feet with leather-stirruped armor nearly painted onto strong legs.  
  
He thinks that his deliverance from this life has come, which he knows is a foolish thought, because when does he ever see Fenris that he is far from _(behind him, offering hope only to take it back before the bite of the blade)_ Hawke? What if Hawke decides that killing him once has taken all the mercy he had left for Anders?  
  
He sees the top of Hawke’s head first as he ascends the stairs and then his golden eyes are on Anders; for a moment, they widen in surprise before they narrow in displeasure.  
  
“Hawke.” Varric’s voice, cautioning but tentative, as though he has seen things from the Champion that may never be told in tavern stories.  
  
Hawke ignores whatever prudent counsel Varric might offer. He’s up the steps and standing over Anders in the space of an indrawn breath.  
  
Anders cranes his head back to look up at the man who turned on his own family to side with the templars. Even now he can’t summon the righteous fury that should be there when he pictures Hawke accepting Meredith’s praise after he helps her kill every mage in her charge, even his own sister.  
  
There’s a _plink_ of a falling droplet of sorrow into the dark well over his feelings, but the ripples still almost before they form.  
  
Hawke holds in him his cold gaze and waits, but Anders can wait better than Hawke now because he has nothing left to push him to speak or move or care. If he couldn’t still feel his magic waiting to come to his call and the submerged threat of emotion, he would think the day’s trials had left him Tranquil.  
  
Hawke finally stirs himself and looks back at the still-burning clinic. “Did you do that?”  
  
 _No._ But Anders isn’t sure if he says it aloud.  
  
He thinks he must not have, because Hawke leans down and hauls him up off the floor by the front of his coat to snarl, “Did you do it?”  
  
Now Anders feels the faintest zephyr of curiosity flit across his calm waters. Why would Hawke care? Aren’t there plenty of other fires in Kirkwall that might be more important than the one in a trashed Darktown clinic?  
  
It isn’t enough to stir him to speak.  
  
“He is broken,” Fenris says, speaking for the first time. “I have seen this…” He hesitates but finishes, “…in Minrathous. In slaves.”  
  
Hawke turns his hot glare on Fenris, “How do you fix it?”  
  
Again, that breath of curiosity. Why does Hawke care?  
  
Fenris’ answer has a vinegar bite that Anders recognizes from the occasions when he speaks of his time as a slave. “I did not have a master who cared enough to try.”  
  
The next he knows, Anders is stumbling and falling to the floor at Fenris’ feet, thrown there by Hawke.  
  
“You’re the closest I have to an expert,” Hawke says, already striding past to go down the stairs. “Bring him back enough to answer questions. If he’s burned all his books, he’s the next best thing.”  
  
Ripples spread from under the dark water, but whatever stirs in the depths does not come near enough to the surface for Anders to identify.  
  
  
  
 **III.**  
Hawke leaves them with only a final caution, "Tell no one Anders is alive," and then he is gone without a backward glance, striding through Darktown radiating such barely contained rage that no one dares speak to him.  
  
Varric gives Fenris a helpless shrug. "You got this?"  
  
Fenris only sounds resigned and weary. "It seems I have no choice in the matter."  
  
Anders can't read the look the two men share over his head. He doesn't know if he would have understood it in the past when he wasn't just a hollow man, but the question doesn't trouble him. He looks at Fenris' feet instead and almost incuriously notes that the tops are not marked with lyrium. He has wondered before about the extent of Fenris' markings, but only in passing. Too much of his mind has been reserved for _(the cause)_ his own concerns _(self-destructive nights spent aching for what could never be)_ and his efforts for others.  
  
Fenris bends to pull him up off the ground while Varric trots off in Hawke's wake. "Follow me," he says as though speaking to a dog or well-behaved horse. "Do you understand?"  
  
Anders does, but his tongue is lead in his mouth. He only holds Fenris' gaze and thinks _(new growth in spring)_ green thoughts for green eyes.  
  
"Pfaugh." Fenris grabs his arm in a painful grip and pulls him, stumbling, away from the ashes of his old life.  
  
He notices little on the trip from Darktown to Fenris' home in Hightown. He stands passively at one point when they encounter a rage demon digging in the remains of a man in guardsman's armor. He lends no aid while Fenris fights the demon and cuts through the shades the creature pulls through the tissue-thin Veil for backup. He does not hear his own soft gasp when Fenris reels back from a pair of shades with blood welling from deep gashes across his side.  
  
Fenris summons some final reserves to cleave through the shades and leap into the air with his sword held high over his head to impale the rage demon before he falls to his knees, one hand clasped to the wounds over his ribs. "Anders."  
  
Anders takes a few steps forward, drawn by habit at the sight of a wounded comrade.  
  
"Anders," Fenris says again, and holds a bloodied hand up to him. "Heal me"  
  
This he can do. This he knows how to do. He reaches out and takes Fenris' hand, lets his magic flow out of his connection with the Fade and into Fenris. He feels it racing through Fenris' body, traveling the lyrium pathways at a speed that outstrips even thought and reverberates through both of them before it pulls back, bringing with it Fenris' wounds and Fenris' pain, and for a fleeting moment, Anders feels again. Then the magic is gone, Fenris is healed, and Anders is on his knees beside Fenris, oblivious to the tears streaking down his dirty cheeks.  
  
  
  
 **IV.**  
Fenris pulls his hand out of Anders' hold and stands while Anders stays where he has dropped. When he looks up, he sees curiosity in the tilt of Fenris' head and the frank stare with which he is pinned. He thinks that must be what he is now - a _(monster)_ curiosity. He is the thing that sparked the tinder that will set the fire _(don't they deserve justice too?)_ that will start a war, and while he remembers his reasons, he cannot summon the feverish conviction that drove his actions.  
  
He cannot even give himself a reason to rise from the ground until Fenris says "Get up."  
  
He finds his feet then and follows when Fenris says to follow him.  He thinks that before he was a hand puppet, manipulated from inside, and now he is a marionette. It's easier this way anyway, to put his marionette strings in someone else's hands and let them dance him along, rather than find the will to move himself. He's used to it _(and empty now)_ , and if Fenris uses him, perhaps it will expiate some of what he wrought with Vengeance.  
  
He will let Fenris hold his strings, because Fenris will not let him misuse the Maker’s gifts again.  
  
Not Hawke. _(Did he kill her himself? Did he put a dagger wet with Anders’ blood into his sister’s heart?)_  
  
They are in Hightown when that thought strikes him, the image coming to him of Bethany’s dark hair and wide eyes growing even wider as her brother betrays not just all mages in general, but his own _sister_ in particular _._  
  
The surface tension breaks and the first real emotion he has felt since waking explodes in his chest. It is caustic and _(make it stop!)_ furious and his steps falter and stop while he sways on his feet with the force of rage and pain and a sense of betrayal on the behalf of all mages that boils away some of his heavy layers of calm.  
  
He is keening without hearing it, he is not seeing the city street or Fenris turning with concern writ large on his face, he is not thinking of who or what he might attract with his escalating, grief-stricken, rage-stricken cry. Where he had been nothing moments before, now he is only a red beam lancing into the sky ready to—  
  
Fenris slaps him. It isn’t hard or meant to harm, but the jolt startles him, and his wail is cut off by his indrawn breath.  
  
“You will _not_ do this,” Fenris snarls in the moment of Anders’ sudden silence. His eyes do not actually change color, but his heavy frown seems to shadow them, turning them from the green of new growth to a dark, secret green of damp moss in hidden places. He latches on to Anders’ upper arm and shakes him. “Do you understand?”  
  
The keening is gone and the rage is receding, if not the pain. Its departure leaves room for another emotion on the lifeless shores of Anders’ dark lake. It struggles to the surface, half-drowned but there – gratitude.  
  
Fenris shakes him again. “You will walk with me to my home in silence. Do you understand?”  
  
This time Anders nods, and that seems to satisfy Fenris. “Good.”  
  
They travel the rest of the way in the silence Fenris demanded, and his grip on Anders’ arm is a lifeline while the rage slips back under the lifeless waters and the simple sense of gratitude struggles not to sink back along with it.  
  
Once inside Fenris’ mansion, he is released, and Fenris stalks away up the stairs. He can stay in the foyer with its corpses and mushrooms, but Fenris turns halfway up the stairs and scowls to see that Anders is still _(haunting)_ standing in the entry room.  
  
“Don’t just stand there,” he says impatiently. “Come upstairs.”     
  
  
  
 **V.**  
Has he ever really given Fenris’ home his full attention before? Every time he came here, it was with _(hope and need and failure)_ Hawke, and there were always other things to think of – his needs, Hawke’s wants, people to help, people to hurt, and _(red thoughts, blood thoughts, rage thoughts, put them down!)_ sela petrae and drakestone.  
  
Why would he have cared about the conditions in which one mage-hating elf lived?  
  
He sees the mansion with new eyes because he has left the distractions behind. He sees the bodies and the mushrooms and the debris and decay. He sees the one room Fenris has claimed as his own with piled books and empty wine bottles, its fireplace and lute and shattered windows and littered floor. He might fit here.  
  
He is thinking his _(broken)_ thoughts of broken things when Fenris snatches him by the coat and shoves him back against the wall. It’s so fast, so unexpected that the spin leaves him dizzied, or perhaps it’s the sight of Fenris inches away from him with lyrium light blazing through even his gauntlets and metal breastplate that shatters his fragile equilibrium.  
  
He’s gasping for air and he doesn’t know why. Fenris’ grip isn’t painful, he didn’t hit the wall hard enough to knock the breath out of him, and he doesn’t _(I’m afraid)_ feel anything but faintly curious and confused.  
  
“Where is it?” Fenris’ breath is sour. Dehydration and exertion smell like this – sour and dry and more sour the more dry it gets. He should rest, Anders thinks distantly. He should rest and have water and—  
  
Fenris shakes him and his head knocks back against the wall with a rap that he almost expects to hear echo in his empty skull.  
  
“Where?” Fenris asks again, harshly. “Where is the demon?”  
  
Which one? Anders thinks. Kirkwall has no shortage of demons, both the kind that are spawned on the other side of the Veil and the ones that are nurtured in mortal hearts. Which demon?  
  
Fenris puts a hand over Anders heart and pushes.  
  
If he never feels that sick sense of violation again, he will still remember it until he dies a final death. His flesh and bone don’t part under the shove, they make room where no room should exist, as though Fenris’ gauntleted fingers slip through the interstices like water through piles of pebbles, finding the empty places without moving the solid objects that are already there.  
  
Fenris’ fingers flow through his chest and wrap his heart and Anders feels something.  
  
Pain.  
  
His body stiffens to prepare for flight until those fingers tighten and his vision greys along the edges. He is a mouse in the cat’s teeth, going limp in the hope that the cat will grow bored and either eat him quickly or move on to livelier prey.  
  
The grip loosens, but now Fenris’ words hold a cutting edge that promises more pain. “Where,” he spits each word out as though it tastes foul to him, “Is. Justice?”  
  
 _(Nowhere.)_  
  
He finds his tongue because he must, and because the one word is an answer and a cry of grief and a plea for mercy and a request for an end to everything, even his life. _“Gone!”_  
  
Fenris searches his face and sees something _(looking at him over a hand of cards before raising the stakes)_ that must make him believe Anders’ answer, because in the next moment the fingers are gone, the hand holding his coat is gone, and Anders sinks to the floor to curl around his chest where Fenris has left his heart to limp from the next beat to the next, miraculously whole for something so fundamentally destroyed.  
  
Fenris snarls something under his breath and stalks out of the room, leaving him alone with the sound of distant shouts borne on chill breezes that whip through broken windows and holes in the roof.  
  
When Fenris returns, it is to drop a bundle of cloth on the floor within Anders’ reach. “You’ll bathe and change into these. Bring that with you and follow me.”  
  
  
  
 **VI.**  
Anders picks up the bundle and a faint scent of dust, cedar, and lavender touches memories _(an accidental touch that is no accident standing side by side at an alchemist’s workbench)_ he doesn’t remember making. They are domestic memories, homey memories and he does not want them, but Fenris is looming over him and his expectation is palpable. He meets Anders’ gaze and curls the fingers of his right hand at his side. “Do it.”  
  
He has to push himself up against the wall, reversing his slide down into the self-protective curl he found after Fenris released him, but those fingers beckon and Fenris’ will pushes, and there is no fight left in him that isn’t going under after another desperate gasp for life at the surface of his black lake.  
  
Fenris nods. _(Approval like a balm on a burn.)_ “This way.”  
  
If he held expectations, he would not expect where Fenris leads him, but he is an empty vessel and the sight that greets him fills him with a blue-lit wonder.  
  
The room under the mansion holds not just one, but two spring-fed pools. Torchlight casts dancing reflections on tile mosaics of ocean waves and fantastical fishes in the walls and ceiling. The larger of the two pools would be suitable for swimming while the smaller pool that it feeds into is large enough for a man Anders’ size to float in with arms and legs outstretched only just touching the smooth marble edges.  
  
Fenris turns away from him to methodically strip away his armor, saying over his shoulder. “I don’t care where you do it, but you’re bathing before you sleep under my roof.”  
  
He can smell Fenris when he peels his armor off his body; it strikes jangling notes of stale sweat and fierce exertion, smoke and blood, desperation and determination. It is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but if he focuses on that, he can leave higher thought behind. It makes Anders lift his head, eyelids dropping closed, nostrils flaring to sift through the disparate odors.  
  
The sound of Fenris slipping into the smaller pool doesn’t jolt him from his reverie, but he loses the scents under the stronger odor of mineral-rich water, not salty, but still heavy.  
  
“Anders.”  
  
Fenris is in the water up to his shoulders. Anders can just tell that he is naked, but the uneven torchlight and dancing reflections clothe his skin in shifting silver and blue like trickles of a spilled lyrium potion on a heat-hazed stone that deceive his eyes as to what is reflection and what is truly lyrium in Fenris' flesh.  
  
“Get in.” Fenris raises a dripping, silver-etched arm to point to dishes laid at intervals on the edges of both pools. “There’s soap there. Use it and be quick. The water is cold.”  
  
To tell the truth of it, Fenris shivers convulsively before setting his teeth and ducking under the water to wet his hair, coming up with a hissed inhalation and lips gone blue.  
  
Anders shivers with him. It will take more than one dip for Fenris to wash away the _(never wash away the blood)_ the filth and stink of the day’s fighting. He sets the cedar-scented clothes by the door and moves to the smaller pool’s edge.  
  
“What are you doing?” Fenris sounds more exasperated than curious. “I don’t think you’re so addled that—”  
  
Anders kneels at the pool’s edge and thrusts his hands into the water. He knows what it is to be cold, even colder than this water that must flow down to Kirkwall from icy springs. He knows and he takes that cold into himself, pushing it down into the cold that he has embraced at his core, balancing it with heat he draws from the Fade _(two sides of a coin)_ and pours out into the water until Fenris clamps a hand on his wrist and snarls, “No!”  
  
He stops, but it’s already too late. His arms and sleeves are soaked up to the elbow in water warm enough to soak the pain out of sore muscles and wash away the reminders of _(slaughter)_ the day’s horrors.  
  
He is passive in Fenris’ grip, waiting in the liar’s light reflected off the water.    
  
  
  
 **VII.**  
Fenris is angry, that much is easy to see, his lips press thin while his cheeks flush red, but Anders doesn’t do what he used to do. He doesn’t prod Fenris to see him snap and bite, because he is long past the time, the mind, the will to be jealous of Fenris for getting _(the knife)_ any of Hawke’s attention. He also knows he can stay there all… night? Day? He can’t remember if there was sun or stars behind the pall over the city _(the hour is none)_ and in this windowless bathing chamber, he has no reference. He is exhausted, but that is as much an exhaustion of the soul as of the body.  
  
He waits and offers no challenge to Fenris’ anger, though a distant, calculating part of his mind pushes a thought out into the hollow chamber where other thoughts used to gather – Fenris could deliver him from living like this; it would only take one small act of defiance, one flicker of magic raised to push the elf from anger to murderous rage.  
  
One act of defiance. _(The strike of a staff on flagstones, once, twice…)_  
  
He closes his eyes and moans, long and low, feeling the surge of self-hatred like bile in his throat, a cold burn like bare skin pressed too long against ice, a scream caught behind the mass that gathers behind his sternum as he realizes that he has _not_ learned from what he wrought if he can allow his thoughts to turn to using someone to his own ends like that again.  
  
The numbness was better.  
  
Fenris releases him so abruptly that he falls and catches himself on his left elbow, his right hand reflexively casts out for some purchase that will keep him from falling face first into the water. He can’t think of hating himself because he is teetering and _(blood spreading from him like steeping tea)_ Fenris will not want him in the small warm pool.  
  
He is flailing and he is falling and there are firm hands on his shoulders, bearing him up, pushing him back, and Fenris _(armored in lyrium even nude)_ is right there to keep him from falling. Right there and again Anders can smell the sour dryness of fatigue and dehydration on his breath. Fenris holds him there on the brink of falling and says, “No magic unless I allow it.”  
  
Anders says nothing. His knees protest being forced to bear most of his weight on the unyielding tiles, but he is distanced from caring about the pain again, just as he wants to be.  
  
Fenris is not satisfied with his silence. This close Anders can see his pupils dilate and his nostrils flare before Fenris pushes him, a hard shove that rocks him back upright on his knees away from the pool’s edge.  
  
“You stink,” _(carrion, charnal house reek, a dead thing without the sense to die)_ Fenris says. “If you’re going to listen, you can join me here. If you want to argue, you can get in the other pool.”  
  
Anders doesn’t want to argue. Now that the spasm of madness has passed _(it hasn’t passed, not at all)_ he doesn’t want anything. Fenris’ want wins by default. He sits back on his heels and unclasps his coat while Fenris sinks back under the water to his neck and backs away to the far side of the smaller pool to watch him warily.  
  
His coat and shirt are glued to his back with dried blood, although with less blood than someone unfamiliar with quick death might expect. Hawke’s knife ended his life too quickly for his heart to pump profligate amounts of blood out of the wound, but there is enough that he has to peel his clothes off his upper body with a sound that reminds him of the time he fell asleep with his shirt off on a hot day. He had been on the run and too tired to wake while he burned until he blistered. The subtle hiss his skin made when it peeled away in the following days is the sound of his shirt peeling off his skin now.  
  
He drops his clothes to the floor in a stinking, bloodied pile and slides into the warm water in the small pool. He will not fight Fenris’ wishes. On the contrary, he has pinned his fragile hope of _(an end)_ expiation for his crimes on the elf who hates mages.  
  
  
  
  
 **VIII.**  
Fenris watches him until he is in the water before he takes a ball of soap from one of the dishes around the pool’s edge and holds it out for Anders. “Take it. Use it.”  
  
The soap is heavy in his hand, but Fenris doesn’t wait to see if he uses it. He’s  turning away to take a rough sponge from another dish to scrub his hands first, where the blood is dense under his nails and creased into his palms. Anders watches because he has never before thought of Fenris as a person who has to bathe away the blood and sweat and pain. He hasn’t wanted to think of him as a person at all before because Hawke _(the pain is still a surprise)_ always seemed to favor Fenris with his gifts and his time. Fenris gets a book; Anders gets an amulet that could get him killed. Fenris gets reading lessons, alone with Hawke; Anders gets….  
  
 _(Sela petrae and drakestone. He knew. He knew, he knew, he knew!)_  
  
The soap slips from numb fingers and makes no sound when it tumbles slowly out of Anders’ sight under the water. He feels it bump against his foot before it rolls away.  
  
He’s so cold inside that he more than half-expects the water to freeze solid around them, locking him and Fenris in an icy embrace. He won’t make a sound this time, he tells himself. He can’t, but he’s putting patterns together that he had been too focused, too blind to see before. Hawke questioned him about the ingredients for the bomb, and challenged his lie, but then helped him anyway. Hawke helped distract Elthina without protest and he…  
  
 _(Anders, what did you do? But with his back to the others, his face said…)_  
  
“He knew.”  
  
He doesn’t realize he’s said it aloud until Fenris stops scrubbing his hand and raises his eyes to look at him. “What?”  
  
Those two words should be a scream. They should inspire rage or horror because Hawke knew what Anders was doing, enabled his efforts, and _(the pain is still a surprise)_ chose the Chantry’s side when all was said and done.  
  
He knew.  
  
His legs will not hold him. His weight has doubled, tripled, the _world_ is on his shoulders pushing him down and he is sinking into the warm water until it covers his chest, his shoulders, his chin, his mouth _(will not scream!)_ his nose, and finally he’s submerged in all ways.  
  
He stays under the water, shivering despite its warmth, until his lungs start to burn. He lets the air out in an explosion of bubbles and stays under, hugging himself for cold comfort. He knows instinct will not let him drown so easily, but he cannot face what he has finally seen in the cold light of truth.  
  
Fenris takes the choice away, hauling him up with hands in his armpits until Anders gasps in a deep breath of air and releases his tight hold on himself to throw his arms around Fenris’ shoulders. They have been used, betrayed, all of them, and the sheer horror of it drives his words away and impels him to cling to Fenris even while Fenris stiffens and flashes lyrium-bright in response to Anders’ effrontery.  
  
He doesn’t care that they are naked or that Fenris is caught between anger and embarrassment while Anders stifles a cry against his shoulder before the pain boils out of his black lake and bursts from him in wracking sobs.  
  
He weeps until he is weak from it, arms and legs leaden in water that feels as thick as old oatmeal, and somewhere in the storm of it, Fenris loses some of his stiffness and pulls Anders to the side of the pool where he can pull him down onto a stone bench built under the water. They sit there, Fenris still straight-backed and staring past Anders’ shoulder; Anders, legs drawn up to curl on Fenris’ lap in a way that wouldn’t have been comfortable for either of them if he weren’t buoyed by the water, and the storm slowly passes.  
  
When it does, it’s as though he has cried out a large portion of the black lake in his soul and he can feel again for now; the lake is fed by a wellspring of pain and anger, and it will be all too easy to go under again.  
  
He’s still hiccupping with sobs that think they’ve found a permanent home when he raises his head from Fenris’ shoulder and whispers, “Hawke knew. He could have stopped me, and he didn’t.”  
  
  
  
  
 **IX.**  
Fenris’ breath catches and Anders waits for a blow or a shove or even a denial. He waits for Fenris’ anger. Hawke is not a mage, he is the man who saved the city from the Qunari, who lost his mother to a mad mage, who has stood on the side of the law if not always on the side of right. He is the man who helped Fenris win his lasting freedom from a magister’s yoke.  
  
He expects Fenris to tell him that Hawke is flawed, but unlike Anders, he is not a monster.  
  
Fenris says no such thing, only sits in the eerie waterlight that bears so much similarity to his lyrium glow, and looks past Anders at something only he sees. Anders has seen this expression on his face one time before – when Danarius confronted him in the Hanged Man – and he wonders what Fenris saw Hawke do. Was it something in the Gallows while Anders lay dead?  
  
 _(After Bartrand and Varania, why not Bethany as well? Hawke never balked at fratricide. Was he cruel to her?)_  
  
Anders has broken his silence only painfully and has no difficulty waiting for Fenris to react. Slowly his hiccups taper down to silence. The water is cooling quickly as it rises to spill over the lip of a drain set below the pool’s edge, displaced by fresh, cold water that feeds in from an opening on the opposite side of the bathing pool. Anders’ thoughts are still sluggish from lingering shock and pain, and he still feels half a man with Justice gone. He thinks that his skin should hang in folds to indicate on the outside how little is left on the inside.  
  
Finally Fenris stirs himself to lift Anders off his lap as easily as he might ordinarily shift an importunate, clinging child. Anders wants something to cling to, but he raises no protest, settling where Fenris puts him on another piece of bench.  
  
Fenris slides off the seat and stands, looking down at Anders with water streaming down his chest, shoulders, and arms, and even now Anders can feel a faint stir of admiration for such beauty. He shouldn’t think it, but he can’t help but see that the patterns Danarius laid into his skin are designed as much for beauty as for utility.  
  
“Are you going to ask where I’m going?” Fenris asks. “What I’m doing?”  
  
Anders shakes his head. If he asks, he might have to have an opinion, might have to act, might have to feel, and he has had enough of all of that for at least this... night? Day?  
  
Down here the moon is down and the hour is none. All he wants is to let someone else care, act, and feel for him.  
  
Fenris shows no surprise. Anders would think he looks serene, but his brows are still drawn down, darkening his eyes. For the first time, Anders thinks that Fenris must be at least as exhausted as he is.  
  
“I think you would let me tell you to jump off my roof and you would do it,” Fenris says in a low, musing tone before he picks up his forgotten sponge and soap. “Wouldn’t you?”  
  
Anders thinks _No_. Then he thinks, _Yes_. Then he thinks, _No, but I’d go up there and let you push me._ But it’s all too complicated to explain, much easier to just look up at Fenris waiting for a question he can answer more readily.  
  
Fenris’ already dark eyes grow darker as his eyebrows pull down even further. He looks fierce and frightening and Anders shrinks back, more than half-expecting that horrible violation in his chest before Fenris finishes the job he started earlier and crushes his heart.  
  
Fenris looks bleakly at the soap and sponge in his hands before his lips turns up at the corners in what is mechanically a smile, if a smile were nothing more than muscles moving thus and so. It isn’t a smile; it is a snarl in smile’s clothing.  
  
“You would,” he says, answering for Anders. “You would and I won’t.  Why are you alive?”  
  
He changes subjects so abruptly that Anders can only stare.  
  
Bubbles well up out of the sponge’s craters as Fenris’ hand closes in a fist. “Why are you alive?”  
  
Anders shakes his head.  
  
Fenris nods and relaxes his grip. “Nor do I,” he says as though Anders had said, _I don’t know._ “But it seems you and your life are mine now.”  
  
He throws the sponge at Anders, bouncing it off his chest when he doesn’t get his hands up in time. “Finish. We’ll sleep and tomorrow I want to talk to Varric.”  
  
  
  
  
 **X.**  
Even the task of getting clean _(some stains never come out)_ daunts Anders, but he has direction from Fenris and habit to guide him. The sponge is harsh and leaves his skin feeling naked and vulnerable as it scrubs away layers of grime, but it’s his back where the _(if I touch it I’ll scream)_ blood has dried like paint on a wall, applied too thick to leave a heavy texture in places.  
  
The water will not just soak it away, it must be scrubbed, and Anders has neither the heart nor the flexibility to reach it all.  
  
Fenris’ disgusted grunt and the shuddering roll of the water with his motion draws Anders’ attention away from his halfhearted attempts to wash away the _(memories)_ blood. Fenris takes the sponge from Anders’ unresisting fingers and gestures with it. “Turn around.”  
  
At first Fenris only uses the sponge, roughly scrubbing away the blood that has painted a blotch on _(his soul)_ Anders’ skin. He jumps at the heavy sound of the sponge hitting the water and jumps again when rough fingertips draw what feels like a circle on his back. He knows that Fenris is circling the point where Hawke’s knife thrust into him and is forced to consider what he has shied from thinking of – what must his back look like? If Fenris can see it to circle it, there must be a mark.  
  
He can’t bring himself to ask and doesn’t thank Fenris for telling him. “It’s black,” Fenris murmurs, still only tracing the periphery of the mark. “A black scar.” Fenris touches an old scar across Anders’ shoulder _(childer grub, nightmare creature, man-maggot-spider)_ and says, “This is normal. This is n—” His fingers brush the black scar and Anders’ knees buckle.  
  
 _(The pain of the wound is not the knife, it’s the pain of murdered hope. How could Hawke allow him to hope that he could fight for his cause and only then push the knife? He hears his own surprised sigh before the world shifts and he is falling, blood heavy in his chest where it spills from his broken heart.)_  
  
Fenris holds him up with a strong arm around his chest until the searing memory goes back into hiding.  
  
“What happened?”  
  
 _(Everything. Nothing.)_  
  
He doesn’t know how to answer, but he knows that he never wants Fenris to touch him there again. He shakes his head and manages to say, “Please.”  
  
Please what? Please don’t touch me there. Please hold me up. Please give me a reason to live. Please help me understand  
  
All that and none. Please is enough. He has little to offer to a man who abhors magic in exchange for what he needs, but _(you and your life are mine)_ he knows he will freely give anything, even when all he has to give is…  
  
He turns in Fenris’ hold and registers the dark shadows leaving his _(green can be hope or rot)_ eyes as his brows raise in shock before Anders’ lips are against his.  
  
 _(Help me. Keep me. Remember that I am yours.)_  
  
He has time to grow cold when Fenris’ lips stay pressed together, his body stiff and uninviting _(a mistake)_. He has time to regret _(fool!)_ and pull away before Fenris raises his free hand and catches Anders’ hair in a hold that keeps their faces only inches apart.  
  
“What are you doing?” Fenris asks, sounding so detached that Anders is certain that he has made a mistake, until he feels the stir of blood slowly swelling Fenris’ cock _(salt and iron on his tongue)_ against his thigh.  
  
His mouth is dry with need and anticipation and fear, and eloquence is a lifetime behind him. All he can say to explain it all is, “Please.”  
  
“Please.” Fenris says it as though he has never heard the word before, rolling it around in his mouth like the finest of wines. He must like the flavor of it because that stirring against Anders’ thigh continues until his cock is a hard line against his flesh.  
  
“You will do as I tell you?” he asks, but hasn’t Anders already shown that he will?  
  
Anders nods, feeling the pull of Fenris’ grip in his hair.  
  
“And if I turn you away?” Fenris asks, but his hips cant forward and Anders can feel that he doesn’t want that.  
  
“Please,” he says to answer the question.  
  
Fenris’ fingers tighten in his hair until Anders gasps, but he holds himself still and his compliance seems to satisfy something in Fenris because he steals that gasp away with his mouth hard over Anders’ mouth.


	2. 11 - 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This _was_ written for the kink meme and there are some kinks in here - oral, deep throat, D/s, and bath porn if that's a kink. I had an old Roman(ish) communal bath in mind when I wrote the surprise in Fenris' basement.

**XI.**

Despite earlier thoughts that Fenris’ breath was sour and dry, his mouth tastes of the sweetest relief, breathing air into Anders’ lungs until he feels as though he can draw a real breath for the first time since he rose from the ground where he had died. Someone else can make the choices, own the consequences, and face the results.

With time, perhaps he will grow strong enough to be ashamed of this weakness, but for now, it’s enough to let someone else _(bleed)_ be strong for him. In return, Fenris can have whatever he cares to take.

He is anchored by the hold in his hair and around his waist, by the slow roll of Fenris’ hips and the water-slicked slide of hardened flesh against his thigh. He needs these holds because every heartbeat pumps more blood to his groin until his head feels full of air and his cock is a thing carved from stone.

When he tries to smooth his hands down Fenris’ sides, he gets a disapproving grunt in return and Fenris’ fingers tug in his hair until he drops his hands.

“No,” Fenris says, his voice low, his lips brushing against Anders’ lips with every syllable. “This is all at my direction or not at all.”

He pulls Anders’ head back until he is looking at the shifting reflections on the ceiling and fighting not to whimper when he feels teeth scrape against his exposed throat. “Say ‘yes, Fenris.’”

The words vibrate through him, his hips buck, his hands dig into his own thighs to keep from reaching for Fenris, and dear Maker, Fenris can make him come like that if he holds him there any longer.

He has to struggle to swallow at this angle to clear his throat enough to squeeze out the answer Fenris expects. “Yes, Fenris.”

He spares a flicker of thought for a moment’s amazement that the words came at all, but perhaps it is not so surprising. He has given himself over to another’s will, and if Fenris wills him to speak, he will speak.

The hum of approval that comes against the hollow of his throat draws another shudder from him, another involuntary thrust of his hips to slide his _(memories of being this hard in the hands of a looming man with a dark past and darker glower of his own)_ cock between their bodies, smooth and hairless on Fenris’ side, and dusted with the light down of coarse blond hair on his side.

So close.

Instinctively he knows that if Fenris has the control, he will especially want control of _this._ He gasps out, “Please,” again, that all-purpose word that means so many things.

In this case, it is a plea and a warning, and Fenris must hear both, because he releases Anders’ hair and takes several backward steps toward the pool’s edge and its submerged benches, pulling Anders easily along with him in the water.

When they reach the benches, Fenris releases him _(loss)_ and hoists himself up on the tiled lip of the pool, leaving his feet dangling in the water while Anders struggles not to cling to him.

“You come when I say you may.” He spreads his legs and points to the bench directly between his thighs. “Kneel there.”

When he kneels he finds himself at eye level with the hard planes of Fenris’ stomach. He wants to lick the rolling drops of water off his stomach, off his thighs, and suckle it all away from his cock. He even has the words for it, they come to him easily when he tips his head back to meet his unreadable gaze. “Yes, Fenris.”

Fenris brushes a lock of wet hair behind Anders’ ear and nods before leaning down to lift Anders’ hands to his thighs. “I come first.”

 

 

**XII.**

Anders nearly puts the lie to Fenris dictate before he can even press his lips to smooth skin. _(First.)_ Fear and need and anticipation and arousal alloy into something that jolts him in the root of his stomach. His cock sways in the water, his body flushes with the expectation of satisfaction, and his mind, oh his mind…

May he always have only such simple things to occupy his thoughts – the smooth skin of Fenris’ thighs under his palms, the faint hum of lyrium in a line where the heel of his left hand rests against a thick brand, and Fenris’ fingers on the back of his head, lightly urging him down until he presses a careful, almost reverent kiss to the head of his cock.

He can taste clean skin and spring water, and when he purses his lips and sucks the head of Fenris’ cock between his lips, he gets his first salty taste of arousal on his tongue.

He fears many things now, but Anders doesn’t fear failing to please here. He sweeps his tongue along Fenris’ shaft behind the tight circle of his lips as he draws his cock deeper and deeper still in response to Fenris’ almost inaudible moan and the light press of fingertips against his scalp.

He is focused, eyes closed, fingers lightly braced on Fenris’ thighs. He is nothing, he is sensation, he is salt on his tongue, an ache between his legs, the eddy and shift of water around his body, he is skin under his palms, tile under his knees.

He is Fenris’ groan when he relaxes his throat and does not stop until he has his nose pressed tight against the unexpected softness of black pubic hair. He is nothing but the desire to please and the need, the need, the _need_ for his own release that has grown with such intensity that it screams like a denial of all the loss and death that is so fresh for them both.

He is also the need to breathe, the relief of pulling away, the press of fingers on the back of his head urging him down again while Fenris almost delicately fucks his throat, moving only enough for the motion to jolt them both again and again until Anders has to pull away, swallow back his gag reflex, breathe deeply through his nose, and give voice to the moan that has been caught in his throat.

Fenris gives him time to recover and starts again, and again, until whatever tenuous sense of time Anders had achieved is lost once more.

He knows that Fenris is close when his fingers snake through Anders’ wet hair and pull, tugging him away to give Fenris, braced on his free hand, room for longer, shallower thrusts up into his mouth.

He is rocking with the thrusts, water caressing over his cock as though it is intent on making him disobey Fenris’ edict. The tiles seem to catch and magnify the sounds of Fenris’ soft grunts, Anders’ even softer moans, water lapping in time with their movement together, and finally, a strangled curse in Arcanum before Fenris shudders and holds Anders in place while his mouth floods with heat, salt, and the taste of bitter iron.

Anders swallows when Fenris drops back on one elbow and lets his head fall back to pant up at the ceiling. He is still full and aching, but he makes no move to touch himself _(nothing is mine)_ while he waits for Fenris to collect himself and say something.

When Fenris does speak, his words are slurred, traveling some great distance from the shores of exhaustion to allow Anders at least this much, “You may come, but be quick.”

Anders presses his lips to Fenris’ thigh and snakes a hand under his body to do as he is told, thrusting into his fist in quick, almost brutal jerks. He can taste semen on his tongue, smell musk against his face, and he has…

He has this, and he will make it enough.

He muffles his sobs against Fenris’ skin when he comes.

He will make it enough, because this is all the hope he has.

 

 

**XIII.**

The heat of orgasm ebbs, replaced by a chill that has crept up on Anders so stealthily that Fenris notes it first, pushing himself upright with a low groan of fatigue to raise Anders’ face with two fingers under his chin. “Your lips are blue. Get out.”

His limbs are too heavy to move, and he isn’t cold. He could just stay in this pool and _(give up)_ let it leech away the warmth he has that he hasn’t earned anyway.

But Fenris is pulling his legs out of the water and standing, leaving Anders with nowhere to rest his face. He cranes his neck to look up at Fenris looming above him, following the perfect columns of his legs, graceful muscle delineated in silver-white, up to his groin where he so recently found timelessness and focus in satisfying _(yes, Fenris)_ Fenris’ needs.

_(There is a word for what Fenris is to him now, but the word is too big for either of them to look at face on.)_

He leaves the pool and stands trembling at the water’s edge feeling unsteady and disoriented by the waterlight’s mad flashes that are stirred by his movements. The reflections move too much, a flash glares across his eye, making him wince and _(Justice)_ stirs memories that threaten to shatter his equilibrium if he allows them to have any power in this place.

Fenris has left the poolside while Anders made his laborious way out of the water. He returns and tosses a towel for Anders to catch, which he does, but not without nearly fumbling it into the water with reflexes that seem to belong to a man three times his age.

“Dry off and get dressed,” Fenris tells him curtly. “Leave your old clothes down here. I’ll decide what to do with them later.”

Keep them, burn them, drop them in one of Darktown’s oubliettes. He does not want his renegade’s rags, and the old clothes and coat that served him so well for so long are ashes in his clinic. It doesn’t matter because Fenris will decide for him.

Relief and hope are fragile companions that cling to one another at the shores of the dark lake in his soul. If once he would have sneered at his complacency in letting Fenris choose what he wears, if he speaks, even if he _comes_ _(I come first)_ , now it is solidity in a world that has been turned upside down.

He dries as he is told, and he dresses as he is told, and he pads barefoot behind Fenris as he is told, climbing back up stairs that seem to have multiplied until he must climb the distance from the Docks to Hightown just to reach Fenris’ one occupied room with its broken windows and sorry excuse for a roof.

He focuses on Fenris’ bare back instead of his fatigue. Fenris is wearing nothing but a towel around his waist, carrying his armor in an ungainly bundle that trails the stink of sweat and smoke and blood as they climb the stairs. Anders can let himself watch the muscles moving under his skin, lyrium flexing and rippling as he shifts sharp armor points to avoid scratching bare skin. He can watch and remember the feel of Fenris’ fingers in his hair, guiding him, holding him _(bitter iron on his tongue)_. If he weren’t so tired, he thinks he could get hard again already just remembering.

He thinks he should find pleasure unreachable, unknowable, _untenable_ now, but his pleasure is almost an afterthought to what he can do _(with)_ for Fenris.

He is ready to sleep where he falls when Fenris tells him to get in the room’s one bed. He doesn’t argue, sliding between sheets so soft and finely woven that they must be plunder from the mansion’s prior occupants. It is an unexpected luxury that confuses Anders with its incongruity amid the decay and ruin, just as the bathing chamber was an expected jewel found in a midden heap, but that confusion cannot compare to what he feels when Fenris slips under the blankets with him and draws him into the circle of his arms.

“Go to sleep,” Fenris says.

For a fleeting instant, Anders wonders if all this is meant only to fulfill Hawke’s command to “bring him back.” Then he doesn’t care, because for a day, an hour, a minute, he has had someone else to do for him what he cannot do for himself.

He closes his eyes and lets the world slide away.

It is enough.

 

 

**XIV.**

Sleep is unaccountably kind to Anders, a man who has long been accustomed to nights broken by nightmares that cannot all be attributed to a Grey Warden’s connection to the darkspawn collective consciousness. Not when common wisdom among the Wardens is that the worst of _those_ nightmares abate outside of Blights. He has more than enough in his past to provide the fodder for endless nightmares of fear, loneliness, anger, and more fear with a soupcon of terror. After what he and Justice wrought in Kirkwall, he has no reason to expect that the Fade will be anything filled with horrors.  

It’s a rare night when his sleep is not broken by at least one _(the Mother, his mother, Karl’s empty eyes, a windowless cell)_ nightmare.

But the world is a broken mirror of itself now, and when he wakes, it isn’t because he has been jarred back to this side of the Veil with a scream scalding his tongue, but because he because he has finally been called out of the dreamless dark by  familiar voices rising outside _(his clinic?)_ the room where he has wakened with an arm thrown over his eyes to block the sunlight beating down on him through an open roof.

He recognizes Fenris’ low rumble and Varric’s tenor. They are mid-conversation, which is sign enough that Anders is not himself. He would be moldering bones in the Deep Roads if he were a heavy sleeper, but he didn’t feel Fenris leave the bed they were sharing and he didn’t hear Varric arrive. Most unsettling of all, when he thinks of getting up to see Varric his stomach floods with acid and his skin prickles with electric apprehension.

Varric is… _was_ his friend _(I wanted you to have this… hand-embroidered by my mother)_ but he can’t bear seeing the look in Varric’s eyes.

He sits up and tilts his head toward the door, listening until he can pick up the thread of conversation.

“…winding down. Isabela’s talking about leaving and I think she’s taking Daisy with her.” Varric’s voice is raspy and blurred around the edges with fatigue and some underlying harmonic of pain or sorrow that drops an acid line of guilt down Anders’ spine. That sound of sorrow is his fault. He has done this to Varric with his choices. 

“Hawke will let her go?” Fenris sounds incredulous. “He kills his own sister and will allow a blood mage to simply sail away with Isabela?”

There it is, the confirmation that Bethany truly is dead. He had imagined it so, but Anders realizes now that he had still somehow held out a feeble, futile hope that Hawke would at least spare his own _sister!_ He curls over the pain in his stomach and hugs himself in a useless attempt to keep himself from coming unmoored to drift away in nothingness again.

He is thinking that at least it doesn’t hurt out there in the black lake when Varric’s retort makes Anders flinch under its whipcrack snap. “Do you want to ask him about it?”

He can picture Fenris’ scowl and headshake that will drop his bangs over his eyes.

“No,” Fenris concedes grudgingly. “I don’t want to speak to Hawke.”

“Noon,” Varric says, and Anders thinks that this is bringing them back to some earlier part of the conversation he missed while he slept.

“Anders hasn’t changed since last night,” Fenris says. “Hawke isn’t going to get anything out of him. I need more time.”

Fenris is lying for him. _(Bethany is dead.)_ Fenris is lying to Varric. _(Hawke killed her.)_

Hawke is coming.

Anders curls more tightly around the pain and closes his eyes.

 

 

**XV.**

Hawke is coming. Hawke is coming. _Hawke is coming!_ The architect of his death _(ached for him once)_ , the spider in the web _(yearned for him once)_ , the sororicide _(loved him once)_ coming to him with so much blood on his hands.

His chest floods with the memory of his own spilled blood and the black scar on his back shatters him. A bath, a moment’s pleasure, and a night of dreamless sleep are not enough, because he wants to hate Hawke, but how can he when he must reserve so much of his hate for himself?  

He doesn’t hear Varric leave. He has curled upon himself like a frightened millipede, turning inward, thoughts spiraling back down, away from the light and into _(darkness, numbness, blankness, the nearest approximation of peace a monster can hope for)_ nothing.

Fenris’ fingers close on his bicep hard enough that tomorrow he will see the outline of four fingers on the outside of his arm and a thumb on the underside by his ribs. He is hoisted roughly upright and the sick rag doll feeling of being handled that way pulls him back enough to raise his head to meet Fenris’ angry eyes.

“When I call you, you will answer me,” Fenris says. His eyes flick away and down for an instant, and Anders cannot countenance what he reads in that moment. Fenris cannot have been frightened, not for him, not even _of_ him. “I haven’t given you permission to leave, do you understand?” Fenris’ fingers tighten so fiercely that Anders feels it even past the numbness and lets out a shuddering sigh.

Fenris is waiting and he is angry _(but that downward flicker of his eyes)_ and Hawke is coming. It clicks into place. Of course. Fenris is not afraid for Anders or afraid _of_ Anders, he is afraid of failing Hawke.

It’s better to be numb.

Fenris must see him trying to withdraw again because he pulls Anders to the edge of the bed and puts his lips to Anders’ ear. His breath is warm, his lips almost tickle the fine hairs, and his voice is low and intimate when he says, “You said you would do as I say. Say it, Anders. Say ‘yes, Fenris.’”

_(Fingers in his hair, salt on his tongue, echoing moans and splashing water.)_

“Say it and trust that I will defend what is mine.”

_(It seems that you and your life are mine.)_

_(It’s enough.)_

Those words draw him back like a lifeline, pulling him back out of the drowning dark until he can feel the pain in his arm as something more than a dull ache, sharp and real, and he can feel Fenris’ teeth scrape the shell of his ear the way he wants to feel them on his throat again.

“Say it.”

Anders sucks in lungful of air like a drowning man hitting the surface and gasps out, “Yes, Fenris.”

When Fenris kisses him, it feels like a promise that what passed between them the night before was not a fluke, not a one-time thing, not a fleeting fancy that Fenris regrets in the hard light of day. The deep press of his tongue between Anders’ lips is possessive and demanding, requiring not just compliance but complicity. Anders must kiss him back, must meet his tongue with his own, must press forward or be pushed under.

It demands that he be present, and for Fenris, he is.

When Fenris releases him, he sways forward, not wanting to part, but Fenris is standing and turning away before Anders can try to _(cling)_ hold him, bring him back, press for more.

“Varric brought food,” Fenris tells him. “Guards rations courtesy of Aveline. She’s keeping everyone indoors while the guards and templars—“ Anders winces. “—clear the streets. There are still demons about.”

Fenris hooks his foot around a bench leg and pulls it out to sit down at the table where a basket sits. “Come here. You will eat and we will talk about what we’re going to do when Hawke gets here. Or rather I’ll talk and you’ll do what I tell you.”

He smiles with no humor to it at all, another masquerading snarl behind the uptilted corners of his lips. “Do you have any objections?”

Anders moves to sit at Fenris’ feet when Fenris points to the floor there. He looks up and shakes his head. “No, Fenris.”

He knows that he’s the reason for Fenris’ shifting frown and darkened eyes, but when Fenris reaches out to touch his hair, he knows that he’s also the reason Fenris licks his lips and twines his fingers in Anders’ hair to pull his face to rest against his knee.

 

 

**XVI.**

“You’re going to eat,” Fenris says while he combs his fingers through Anders’ hair as though he were a favored pet, patiently working out sleep tangles with gentle _(her hands were always work-roughened, but she was always gentle with him, and her fingers could dance across cloth, leaving behind a trail of embroidery like footprints in sand)_ dexterity. Those fingers could just as easily plunge through his skull to end his life as they unknot his fine blond hair, but the touch only leaves Anders feeling cared for, not threatened.

He isn’t hungry. He recognizes that he should be famished when he can’t even remember the last time he ate. In the last hours of his old life, he believes that he became, at least for a time, something that Corypheus would have recognized as kindred. He doesn’t doubt that Anders-as-Vengeance would have stormed the gates of the Golden City to demand concessions from the Maker himself with as little forethought and compunction as those long-ago magisters. If they had not done it first, he would have been willing to defile the Maker’s city with living flesh, turning gold to black, paradise to blight.

What use has a creature like that for something as mortal as food? He’s no longer Vengeance, but his appetite hasn’t returned.

Appetite or no, Fenris leaves off combing through Anders’ hair to open the basket of food that Varric brought for them. He takes out a fat, thick-skinned sausage, a block of hard cheese, and a loaf of equally hard dark bread, setting them on the table with a murmur of pleased approval when he finds a few small, dried out apples and under it all a bottle of wine. Varric must have included the wine, because Anders can’t imagine that Aveline would have allowed it in her guardsmen’s rations.

He cuts pieces of everything, tasting the sausage before passing a piece down to Anders that has a crescent bitten out of it with the precise imprint of Fenris’ teeth in its edges. _(The promise and threat of those teeth against his throat and his body responds, wanting both. He can lose himself either way.)_

“Eat,” Fenris says with a hint of impatience, and Anders presses his lips to the inside curve of the bitten crescent for a kiss-by-proxy before he forces himself to bite, chew, and swallow.

Fenris repeats the process with the cheese and the bread, taking bites himself before passing pieces on to Anders to eat. Eating does less to fill the hollow at his core than Fenris’ occasional murmurs of approval when Anders takes a piece of bread or cheese from his fingers and eats without being told to.

When they have eaten enough to satisfy Fenris, he returns what is left to the basket and goes back to petting Anders’ hair, doing so in silence for so long that Anders starts to drift, eyes falling closed, body relaxing until his cheek rests against the outside of Fenris’ thigh. Tension runs out of his shoulders and back like water until he feels as though only Fenris’ touch keeps him from simply sliding down to the floor to use his feet as a pillow.

“Hawke will be here at noon,” Fenris says in that peaceful silence, and all the tension spills back up into Anders like a geyser’s surge into his body, turning the food in his gut into something roiling and scalding along the way. He stiffens, and for a moment Fenris’ fingers still, pressing against his scalp to hold him in place, giving him only enough room to move to turn his eyes up to see Fenris’ grim expression. “Give him nothing.”

It’s too late _(angry red light erupting as though to pierce the sky and reveal Void or Veil for all to see)_  for that, isn’t it?

“Nothing,” Fenris repeats. “Don’t answer, don’t react. Be as empty for him as you were yesterday. I will be there and I will not let him harm you, but I must watch him now until he tips his hand.”

When his lips turn up, he almost convinces Anders that he is smiling this time, not snarling. “It’s just like wicked grace night at the Hanged Man.”

 

 

**XVII.**

Hawke comes like a storm, his arrival heralded by the thunderclap crack of the mansion’s door slamming open, the sound echoing through empty rooms and up leaf-littered stairs to strike Anders like an open-handed slap.

Fenris must feel his flinch against his leg, under his fingers. He casts a glance toward the door and raises Anders’ face to his as he bends to whisper, “Remember, be nothing for him.” He passes the barest touch of his lips over Anders’ lips before he is rising, taking Varric’s gift of wine with him as he crosses to the fireplace in a handful of long strides.

Anders shudders and forces himself not to flee like a child running from a nightmare made flesh. The cheese he ate feels curdled in his stomach, the sausage coming back to him like a grease fire in his gut. He hates the food for coating his mouth in a thick gummy paste that covered the taste of Fenris’ lips, but he can’t afford hate.

He can’t afford any feelings at all. Not even gratitude to Fenris for his baffling kindness. He must be nothing. He must go back into the dark and trust that either Fenris will bring him back, or that he will be where he belongs anyway.

He can hear Hawke’s footsteps on the stairs and looks up from the fire to give Fenris a look of naked pleading that is met with a fierce glare before Fenris turns his attention to opening the bottle, looking up when Hawke finally stands in the doorway.

He _looms._

_(Bethany, leaning against her brother’s arm and laughing while Hawke smiles and calls her “Sister.”)_

Hawke has never seemed larger than he does now, filling the door frame and blocking the weak light that filters in behind him.

He needs to be empty, he needs to be gone, he needs _(the knife is sharp and parts the leather of his coat as easily as it slips through his tunic’s cloth, pierces flesh, and slips neatly between his ribs to puncture first his hope and then his heart)_ to be nothing.  

The first tears burn like acid in his eyes and run hot down his cheeks, but the scar on his back is as cold as the knife that put it there.

Hawke’s lip pulls up at the corner in a contemptuous sneer. “Is he talking?”

“No,” Fenris pulls the cork free with a faint pop and takes a swig from the bottle. “He just stares at the fire or sits there crying.”

The contempt in Fenris’ delivery cuts every bit as deep as Hawke’s knife.

“Shall I pour you a glass?” Fenris asks after another pull from the bottle.

But Hawke is in motion – Hawke is always in motion – striding from the door to tower over Anders where he sits on the floor. His fingers tap along the hilt of the sword at his hip, describing a frenetic rhythm over and over while he glowers down at Anders.

Anders fixes his eyes on Hawke’s restless fingers. If he put his hand palm to palm with Hawke’s hand, he would look like a child in comparison. The desires he has harbored about these hands _(holding him, lifting him, enfolding him)_ come back to him and make his gorge rise.

He must give nothing. He must think nothing. He must be nothing. He watches those fingers tap out some message of relentless anger and turns inward to the cold and the dark where Hawke cannot touch him.

“What have you tried to get him to talk?” Hawke asks.

“Pfaugh.” Fenris spits into the fire. “I am no healer, but I have seen that when slaves slip away like that, violence only drives them farther into themselves. You have left me to care for the abomination, but if he is ever to give you what you want, I cannot torture it out of him.”

Hawke drops into a crouch in front of Anders so abruptly that only luck keeps him from gasping in surprise. He knows instinctively that Hawke will seize on any reaction like his mabari seizing prey and worrying it in his jaws.

Hawke’s eyes are shot so heavily red that his amber irises have an unearthly shine amid the bloodied sclera.

“Get out.”

Fenris doesn’t react, perhaps not understanding that the words are directed at him until Hawke turns his head and repeats himself in a harsh growl. “Get out. I’ll tell you when you’re needed.”

“Hawke,” Fenris sounds confused at the order and Hawke cuts him off, his voice rising almost to a shout.

“Get. Out!”

Fenris leaves the room.

And Anders is alone with his killer.

 

 

**XVIII./XIX.**

Hawke isn’t satisfied with merely forcing Fenris out of his own room. He rises from his crouch and closes the door. The hinges scream a protest after years of neglect, but Hawke moves the door effortlessly and pushes it shut with a soft _snick_ of a latch dropping closed that seems to drive all of the air out of the room.

It’s strange how the tears continue to well up in Anders’ eyes and spill in hot runnels down his cheeks, when he can’t tell if they are tears of sorrow, fear, or anger. They follow the line of his jaw and drip from his chin, onto his hands _(blood and tears feel the same when the drops fall)_ where they’re knotted in his lap.

Hawke sees the tears when he returns to hunker down in front of Anders. He reaches out and catches a falling tear on his index finger and shakes his head. It’s all Anders can do to try to keep his eyes focused past Hawke’s face, as though he can see through it to the back of his skull. He can’t stop the slow flow of tears, but he must give Hawke nothing else.

_(Be nothing for him.)_

“Anders,” Hawke says, and his tone is gentle, coaxing. “I know you feel betrayed, but you have to see that I had no choice.” He rubs the tear into his skin with his thumb before he pushes a strand of hair out of Anders’ eye and tucks it behind his ear with a touch that is surprisingly delicate from a man whose hands can crush bones.

 _(Don’t flinch. Don’t look. Don’t give in.)_ Anders’ focus shifts to Hawke’s bloodshot eyes. It _was_ his fault, not Hawke’s….

 “I can’t afford a war with Starkhaven now, you can understand that.” He sounds so reasonable, like the man he was years ago, before his mother died. Anders had admired Hawke so, but after Quentin, it was as though some slow poison had been fed into his veins. It poisoned him against the world in general, but mages bore the brunt of his vitriol.

If he and Merrill had not been using Hawke just as much as Hawke had been using them, perhaps they would have both fled from him years ago.

_(Ached for him despite his almost-casual cruelties.)_

Looking into Hawke’s eyes and seeing the lines of pain and tension and deep-seated rage drawn around them, he thinks that perhaps they would have both stayed anyway. They have all stayed by Hawke’s side because he is the heart of the storm and it is better to shelter there than go out into the tempest.

“I need to protect Kirkwall now more than ever,” Hawke goes on. “After what you did.” _(It’s your fault, Anders.)_

“I need _you_ to help me protect Kirkwall,” Hawke says and cups Anders’ cheek in his massive scarred hand, exactly the way Anders has imagined so many times over the years they have known each other. He isn’t proud of the nights that he touched himself thinking of those hands on his face, on his body, lifting him up to bring the two of them together. Hawke used to make him feel both vulnerable and protected.

_(He knew there was no potion.)_

Now he just feels vulnerable.

“You did this and you used me to do it,” Hawke says, and his tone is still gentle, but his hand is growing heavy on Anders’ cheek. “You owe me.”

Hawke is an addiction. One that Anders knows he can fall back into; it would feel just like sliding back into the cold and the dark at his own core. Maker, but it is tempting, but the black scar is an ice burn on his back, reminding him that this man whom he has trusted once dangled hope of redemption in front of him and then killed him.

He lets his focus slide to the back of Hawke’s skull and doesn’t flinch when Hawke’s mask starts to crack, first with a twitch at the corner of his left eye, then a quick flash of teeth when his lips draw back in the start of a snarl quickly suppressed.

The hand on his cheek is no longer there as a comfort, it’s a threat, but Anders feels an unexpected upwelling of strength in the knowledge that Hawke can’t break what is already broken.

He doesn’t know what it costs Hawke to fix his mask back in place, but his façade of caring returns, and he asks, “Has Fenris hurt you? Are you afraid to talk to me because of him?” He leans close enough for Anders to smell something sour and tainted on his breath. “You know that I won’t let him hurt you.” _(Only I get to hurt you.)_

“Tell me,” Hawke says. “I know you two were never friends.”

That sentence ruptures any illusion of caring. Hawke knows they were never friends, but he left Anders with Fenris. Is he _hoping_ that Fenris hurt him more?

If he gives any response, Hawke wins, and Hawke may take him back to his estate, or to Viscount’s Keep, or even lock him away in the Gallows.

Anders is certain that Hawke will hear his heart pounding with sudden fear at the thought of losing his unexpected anchor to the living world. He will see the pulse leaping in his throat, he will smell the fear like a predator scenting prey and he will attack.

He looks past the back of Hawke’s skull, fixing his eyes on a memory he can use like a totem. _(Fenris is panting for breath, water dripping from his hair, his head tipped back to turn his face toward the rippling reflections on the bathing chamber’s ceiling.)_

He conjures every detail he can from that moment and holds it between himself and Hawke. Memory is so often his enemy, let it be his ally just this once.

“Justice, if you’re in there, you know it’s right to help me,” Hawke says, trying another tack. “You _know_ that Kirkwall deserves your help in its defense after you put the city on the map as a danger.”

_(The water is growing cold around his legs.)_

“Anders,” Hawke growls, and he can hold the illusion of gentle care no longer, _“dammit…”_

_(His tongue is heavy with the taste of salt and bitter iron…)_

Hawke pushes him with the hand on his face, and he falls back against the table leg, making no effort to catch himself even when the leg catches him across a shoulder with a crack that makes his arm go numb before the incipient bruise wakes with pain.

The pain pulls him back to the present and his eyes focus on Hawke just long enough to see him wiping his hand on his pants leg. It is the hand that had been cupping Anders’ cheek, and Hawke is wiping it as though he had touched something foul.

 _This_ is the truth of the man he followed for so many years.

This is the man he trusted.

This man hates him.

Anders doesn’t have to try to lose focus this time. He runs from the sight of Hawke’s face twisted in disgust, turning his sight inward to a waterlight-filled room, warmth against his skin, and the words, _it seems you and your life are mine now._

 

**XX.**

“Anders.”

There are strong arms under him, lifting him up. The world sways around him, down for up, up for down, whirling dizzily, even with his eyes closed. He doesn’t remember closing his eyes, and he feels a spike of clawing terror that Hawke has decided to take him.

“Anders.”

Not Hawke’s voice, and the breath on his face carries the sharp edge of wine. He opens his eyes just as Fenris settles him on the bed.

Behind Fenris’ head as Anders looks up at him, the open roof shows sky so light at midday that the blue is almost white. It makes his eyes water and burn until Fenris moves to block his view and force Anders to look into his face.

“We’re alone now,” he says. “Are you hurt?”

Anders blinks, seeing Fenris’ glowing silhouette against his lids every time his eyes close. Is he hurt? When is he not hurt? He has taken a mortal wound that will never leave him.

Fenris must see his incomprehension because he rephrases the question. “Did Hawke hurt you?”

_(Hawke wipes his hand down his leg to wipe away the touch of Anders’ skin, his expression twisted with disgust.)_

Yes, Hawke hurt him, but that isn’t the hurt Fenris means either. He remembers the push that came before, the lightning flash of pain in his shoulder that is a dull ache now, easily ignored. He could heal it, but he remembers Fenris’ prohibition against magic. Compared to a fatal knife wound, it’s nothing; whatever Hawke did to him will heal on its own.

As Fenris’ brows draw down in a familiar glower at his unresponsiveness, Anders shakes his head to show that he has heard him and that no, Hawke didn’t hurt him the way Fenris means.

“Then say it,” Fenris says in a tone that brooks no argument or disobedience.

How can Fenris not understand that he doesn’t want to speak? Every word is a tether to the immediacy of this life. He wants to be silent, he wants to be still, he wants to be nothing and Fenris keeps demanding speech—

He feels his eyes widen with sudden comprehension.

_(Fenris watches Hawke haul him up outside the burning clinic and says “He is broken. I have seen this…in Minrathous.”)_

Anders thinks that Fenris has seen this in the mirror.

“Did you lie?” The words tumble past the dam his lips have made against speech. “When you told Hawke that you didn’t have a master who cared enough to fix a broken slave?”

Fenris’ lips tighten, his eyes narrow, and Anders knows he didn’t expect this question and that he isn’t pleased with it.

“I’m—” _sorry._

Fenris cuts the apology with a raised hand. “I lied, but if you think that Danarius was so kind to me as I have been to you, know only that I also lied about the efficacy of violence. It can work, but at a cost.”

“Why?” Why be kind? Why lie to Hawke? Why _(fingers in his hair, his throat full, the weight between his legs growing heavier with every moan)_ any of it?

Anders watches him with an intensity he had thought was part of his old life and left behind along with it. He sees the way Fenris’ eyelids grow too heavy and droop, the way his shoulders hunch under the weight of some burden, the way the corners of his mouth turn down, and he sets aside any expectation of getting an answer.

“I have many reasons,” Fenris says at last, slowly, reluctantly. “But my reason for kindness rather than pain…” He turns his right hand palm up at hip level and closes his fingers into a fist. “What would I be now if my master had been kind instead of cruel?”

It’s good, Anders thinks, that he’s already lying down, because seeing Fenris this exposed steals the strength from his limbs, and when Fenris raises his eyes from his clenched fist and lets it drop at his side, his slow, forced smile is painful to behold.

“We’ve all seen enough cruelty. Shall I honor the memory of the one decent and strong mage I have known by bringing more?”

Anders shakes his head and swallows the tightness in his throat to say, “No, Fenris.”

Fenris nods once and lets the smile drop. “Then tell me, did Hawke hurt you?”

“No, Fenris.”

“It isn’t over,” Fenris says. “He’ll be back tomorrow.”

Anders shudders and reaches for Fenris’ hand when he turns to leave the bedside. Fenris goes still at the touch, lyrium light flickering up his arm from the lines where Anders’ fingers press. His brows pull down and Anders says the one word that can mean so much in their strange context, “Please.”


	3. 21 - 30

**XXI.**

There’s a weight to Fenris’ regard, heavy and intense while his eyes move over Anders’ face as though to read all the nuances of that _please_ from his features. Anders can only hope that Fenris can read him the way he has read him so many nights over a hand of cards, calling his bluffs, raising his bets, and almost always walking away with more coin than Anders should ever have put on the table.

This time Anders puts everything on the table.

Fenris’ eyes drop from Anders’ face to their hands where Anders still has an importunate hold, flickers of lyrium light like lightning crawling through a thunderhead paint the bones of Anders’ hand in backlit relief before Fenris draws a deep breath and the light goes out.

 _“This isn’t right.”_ Fenris’ words come in Arcanum. Anders has heard the liquid roll of Fenris’ mother tongue from him hundreds of times, mostly in combat, and otherwise in moments when he is angry or troubled. Anders studied Arcanum at the Circle, and it’s a beautiful language, especially when spoken by Fenris, but it almost always signals trouble. _“What we did last night isn’t right. I am no man’s slave, nor any man’s master.”_

He has never once given Fenris any indication that he understands the Tevinter tongue, and now, listening to Fenris slip back into the language of his homeland, Anders is eavesdropping on a private conversation. His tongue is already leaden from the weight of all the words he has spoken in recent minutes, so many words after a long silence, and what words would help ease Fenris’ mind anyway?

Fenris does not want it, but he has fallen so easily into the role. As easily as Anders has put his power into Fenris’ hands in the first place.

“Please,” he says again, and rises on his elbow to bring Fenris’ hand to his lips, pressing kisses between the lines on the back of his hand that are drawn there in metal, magic, scars, and pain. “Please.” _If it’s wrong, it’s my choice to be wrong._ “Please.” _You aren’t taking, I’m giving._ “Please.” _Just let me be yours._ “Please, Fenris.”

_Please understand the words I can’t say._

Fenris jerks his hand out of Anders’ grasp and Anders lets him go with a muted cry of loss, watching him stalk away to the fireplace, resting his forehead on an arm braced against the wall before he turns and  snarls, “You don’t know what you’re asking!”

Asking? Anders knows he isn’t asking, he is _begging_ with every fiber of his being.

He is begging Fenris to be what he fears.

The realization is a slap in the face that rocks him back and knocks his arm out from under him. He is still selfish and still using others to his own ends. _(I need your help. … Sela petrae and drakestone … One last thing, I need you to distract the Grand Cleric…)_

The shame should melt the flesh from his bones, it burns so sharply and so entirely.

“Please,” he whispers past the shame and turns onto his side to draw his legs up to his chest. _(Forgive me.)_ He wants to slip back down into nothingness, but the surface of his dark lake is roiling with the upwelling of self-loathing, guilt, and shame. His inner darkness isn’t calm, it’s turbulent and no escape.

He is only aware of Fenris’ return when the mattress sinks under his weight, shifting and rocking until Fenris is over him, pushing him onto his back to allow Fenris to straddle him with his knees outside Anders’ thighs and his palms pinning Anders’ shoulders to the bed.

Anders looks up at him helplessly, still burning with the knowledge of his disgrace, but meeting Fenris’ eyes because that is clearly what he expects.

“Last night,” Fenris says, “I thought you only wanted _that_ for a night, but you don’t, do you?”

That? Safety and surety and… _(fingers holding him in place while Fenris thrusts into his throat with such careful control)_ …and even pleasure? No, not just for a night, but Fenris doesn’t want it.

Does he?

Fenris smoothes one thumb along Anders’ collarbone and speaks more for himself than for Anders. “It isn’t the same when ‘no’ is allowed.”

His brow is smooth, his eyes are once again the green of renewal, and when he tilts his head at Anders, something in his expression extinguishes most of Anders’ burning shame. “Do you want to know my secret?”

Anders manages a tiny nod.

Fenris’ lips curl in a smile that is two parts humor and one part hunger, “I like having a mage under me, saying ‘yes, Fenris’ the way I used to say ‘yes, Master.’”

 

 **XXII.**  
Anders is the mouse under the owl’s unblinking gaze, the rabbit frozen still to hide from the fox, the deer that has caught its breath to avoid drawing the attention of the wolf, but the wolf has found him and fixed him in a green stare that drives the last bit of breath out of him in a whisper, “Yes, Fenris.”  
  
The humor disappears from Fenris’ smile leaving only hunger before his mouth is crushed over Anders’ mouth, tongue pushing past his startled gasp with a lingering flavor of the wine Fenris had been drinking when Hawke was there. He leaves Anders no room to do anything but submit, to close his eyes, to part his lips, to raise his hands to cling to Fenris’ sides, and finally to wrap his arms around Fenris’ back when Fenris lowers himself to bring their upper bodies together, frustratingly with his hips still raised to afford Anders nothing against which to rub himself.  
  
If Fenris still has misgivings, they’re hidden behind a need that he and Anders share together, balanced perfectly – to take and be taken, to give and to receive, to dominate and to submit.  
  
Fenris moves to brace himself on his forearm, twining fingers in Anders’ hair, pulling his head to the side to expose the length of his throat for him to kiss and lick, grazing his teeth over Anders’ skin until Anders is panting with anticipation – of what, he doesn’t know, but the air feels thick and fraught, like the last moments before the storm breaks, when what comes will be an unremitting deluge.  
  
The gathering energy bursts over them when Fenris’ teeth close on the side of Anders’ throat, biting, bruising, sending jolts of alloyed pain and arousal through his body. He can feel a thready whine escaping from behind his clenched teeth, while his fingers dig into the leather covering Fenris’ back, finding the gaps in the jerkin that run down Fenris’ spine for a fingertip contact with skin and lyrium. His toes curl, and his heels dig into the mattress to brace him when his hips jerk up, finding nothing but thin air to rub himself against. That absence pulls another sound from deep inside him, a moaned assent and plea, the need is so real, so immediate and so _good_ after recent experience. If he’s going to hurt, let it be like this where the hurt serves them both.  
  
Fenris makes a low sound against his throat, one Anders could imagine coming from the wolf that is Fenris’ namesake. It’s feral and dangerous and vibrates against Anders’ skin sending tremors through his limbs, tightening his stomach, and pulsing blood into his cock until its fullness is just another ache.  
  
Fenris is moving above him, hips rolling, thrusting at air when he could be _(should be)_ thrusting into Anders. Into his hand, his mouth, his body, Anders doesn’t care, but the tease and promise of those motions, the sharp blossom of another bite in the curve of his shoulder, and that low, possessive, dangerous rumble against his skin make him want to give wings to his leaden tongue to find the words to beg Fenris to take this to another level where their bodies are joined.  
  
When Fenris pulls away and falls onto his side on the mattress beside Anders, he tries to roll to face Fenris, only to be pushed back, firmly but gently.  
  
“Get up,” Fenris says, his normal smooth tones reduced to a dark burr. Anders notes with a tiny thrill of satisfaction that Fenris is panting, his eyes are wide, his pupils huge and dark enough to pull all the light out of the room. “Take off your clothes.”  
  
Anders scrambles off the bed with graceless haste. He should do better, but… next time. Next time he will be more graceful. This time he wants to hurry to the moment when they are together on that bed, skin to skin, when Fenris might let him ease his aching soul along with his aching body.  
  
He unbuttons the shirt Fenris has given him, stealing glances up from his fingers’ fumbling work on the buttons. Every time Fenris is watching him with the barely contained tension of an eagle about to launch itself from its branch to snatch its prey out of its life.  
  
He turns to set the shirt aside and Fenris stops him with a harsh, “What is that?”  
  
Anders pauses, confused, turning to look over his shoulder where Fenris is rising to his knees and reaching for him, pulling him back to the bed with fingers hooked in the waistband of his trousers.  
  
“That.” His fingers trace a line across Anders’ shoulder. “This bruise is fresh.”  
  
Anders realizes that Fenris has seen the mark left after Hawke’s push.  
  
  
  
 **XXIII.**  
Anders has to crane his neck to see where Fenris’ fingers lightly rest against his skin. The bruise is an angry red line with the first bloom of purple-black at its heart. For men who have faced what they have, both together and separately, it hardly merits the level of concern Fenris is showing. He’ll be sore, but it will heal on its own; it’s just _(Hawke’s face is twisted with revulsion)_ a bruise.  
  
Except that Fenris’ expression says otherwise. He is scowling at the mark as though it is a mortal enemy.  
  
“Did Hawke do this to you?” he asks, tracing the line again with a feather-light touch that makes Anders shiver with reignited need. His nerves are singing under the rough skin of Fenris’ fingertips and all he wants is to return to losing himself in something so mortal and _alive_ as desire.  
  
Fenris tugs on Anders’ waistband with his other hand, shaking him out of his lust-addled distraction. “Answer me.”  
  
Between the impatience in Fenris’ demand and the shake delivered through the cloth at his hip, Anders finds his tongue for a reply. “Yes, Fenris.” Of course, there’s so much more he doesn’t say, _It was my fault,_ or _It isn’t a real hurt,_ or _His face… you should have seen his face._  
  
“Why didn’t you tell me? I asked you if he had hurt you.” Fenris drops his hand from Anders’ shoulder to his waist to turn Anders to face him, tugging at his trousers until Anders kneels by the bed looking up at him. “You lied to me.”  
  
Anders shakes his head immediately, anxiously, sending his unbound hair flying around his shoulders and face. “No!” He grasps at Fenris’ knees, turning his face up to let him see the naked pleading for understanding there. Not all truths can be conveyed in a simple yes or no.  
  
Fenris’ brows are knit so low with his glower that Anders is certain that Fenris is going to push him away, rescind his protection, pass Anders’ control back to him like a piece of trash he picked up after mistaking it for something valuable.    
  
“Then explain,” Fenris says, and Anders’ heart sinks.  
  
Explain.  
  
After years of manifestos, words used as leverage, as weapons, and sometimes as poisons, his well of words is down to dregs that replenish only a slow droplet at a time, and he used so many already.  
  
Fenris pins him under a stare that brings to mind the darkest green heart of a forest floor, blocked from the sun by cathedral columns of trees that have no mercy for lesser beings scrabbling for life at their roots.  
  
Anders parts his lips to speak and closes them again when the words won’t come. There are no words for how Hawke harmed him, but barely hurt him, how a bruise is nothing when there’s a black scar just inches below it that is a _real_ wound, how even if Hawke _had_ hurt him, hadn’t he brought it upon himself anyway?  
  
He lowers his forehead to rest against Fenris’ knees and searches until he finds four words and offers them up as all the answer he can give. “It wasn’t a knife.”  
  
Then he waits for another knife or a hard push away or a scathing command to _get out._  
  
He muffles a sob of relief against Fenris’ knee when a hand strokes through his hair before resting on the crown of his head like a benediction.  
  
The room is silent enough to hear the sharp pop of a log in the fireplace, the distant shouts of guards announcing another street searched and cleared, and the steadily limping beat of Anders’ wounded heart in his ears.  
  
“Heal it,” Fenris says into the almost silence.  
  
Anders raises his head to see that Fenris’ eyes are still dark, but he senses that the anger is not meant for him.  
  
“Heal it,” Fenris says again then presses his fingers against the side of Anders’ throat, drawing his attention to a fresh bruise where Fenris had bitten him. “Heal this, too.” He touches another bruise in the join of neck and shoulder, pressing to wake a pain that is a sweet reminder of lips and teeth. “Leave this.”  
  
Anders straightens, leaning away until he isn’t touching Fenris before he releases some of the constant control he keeps on his magic, channeling it into his own body, directing it with the finesse of a skilled healer to smooth the bruises away as though they had never been there. He flinches away from the scar on his back when his magic brushes by it, feeling suddenly cold, but Fenris distracts him with a touch on his cheek and an approving nod.  
  
“I won’t have your thoughts turn to him when I have you under me. Do you understand?”  
  
  
  
 **XXIV.**  
The words _when I have you under me_ bring Anders as close to a smile as he’s come since waking to this new life with its confusions and revelations. It might not touch his lips, but just the idea that a smile might someday be possible again raises his spirits.  
  
He raises his eyebrows in a silent question, touching the side of his neck where he healed one of Fenris’ bite bruises.  
  
Fenris cuts his eyes to the side before bringing his gaze back to Anders’ face, meeting his eyes with a stare that challenges Anders to criticize. “It would be obvious even when you’re dressed. The other one,” he traces the imprint of his teeth still left at the join of Anders’ neck and shoulder, “can be covered by your shirt.”  
  
It could also have been healed just as easily as the other bruises, but Anders thinks that Fenris might enjoy seeing his mark on Anders’ flesh just as much as he already admitted to enjoying having Anders under him saying, _yes, Fenris._  
  
He says it now, “Yes, Fenris,” and lets his upper body tip forward to put more weight against Fenris’ fingers, waking the soreness of the bite mark and bringing back the memory of Fenris above him, pain and need melding into something that makes him feel alive, instead of drifting through Kirkwall as a ghost with a pulse.  
  
Fenris nods to himself and says, “Finish undressing.”  
  
While Anders stands, Fenris stretches out on his back, propping his pillow under his head to watch him slide the grey trousers off his hips to drop to the floor at his feet. Looking down at himself, Anders tries to see what Fenris sees – his legs are long and strongly muscled from running everywhere behind Hawke, a man who slows to walk only when forced to; his stomach is flat, almost concave both from all the exercise and from the fact that for many years food has been little more than fuel for the cause which he embodied. Even so, his abdominal muscles are clearly defined and his chest and shoulders are broad and strong; wielding a sword-tipped ironwood staff has strengthened his upper body just as surely as all the running and Kirkwall's endless stairs have defined his legs and ass. And on every limb, on his torso, across his shoulders, there are scars – long, thin scars; a few thicker, gnarled scars; marks of blades, claws, teeth, and weapons far crueler. He remembers a conversation between friends, _our mistakes make us who we are,_ and knows that his scars are just roadmaps to so many of his mistakes.  
  
His face is no prize in his opinion with his too-long jaw and too-narrow chin, but he has always thought his _(haunted)_ eyes were worth a second glance and his hair, unbound around his shoulders probably gives him a wanton look that will go well with the swell of his cock, hanging at the junction of his thighs suspended between softness and the aching fullness that had been upon him before _(Hawke)_ the bruise had broken the moment. He wonders if his human hairiness, golden hair on his legs and arms and auburn at his groin, an almost white-blond trail up his stomach and more gold across his pectorals, is repellant to Fenris or fascinating, or barely worth passing note.  
  
When Fenris' attention drops to his groin, his cock sways as though the touch of his eyes had weight, reacting to the involuntary clench of Anders' stomach muscles when the need to be _(real)_ touched, _(needed)_ wanted, and _(possessed)_ taken strikes him like a blow.  
  
The movement brings a predatory sharpness to Fenris’ expression that makes Anders’ body clench again, provoking another bobbing sway from his cock that says what he cannot – that he wants, oh Maker how he _wants_.  
  
Fenris nods as though he has heard the plea and flattens his hands on his hips, framing the laces that hold his leggings closed. The leather is so tight to his body that Anders can trace the line of his cock in near-perfect detail, adding memory from the night before to fill in details where leather hides subtleties like the line of a vein along the shaft or the perfect, hairless softness of the skin over his scrotum.  
  
When he looks up, Fenris’ lips have a smug curve to them that says he has noted Anders’ regard.  
  
“Come here and open my laces.”  
  
  
  
 **XXV.**  
Having a simple direction to follow lifts an immeasurable weight from Anders’ shoulders; that it’s a pleasant instruction, only makes Anders feel lighter. Perhaps with more time and trust, he might feel only as heavy as a normal man again. Fenris pats the bed with an open palm, and Anders takes it as direction and permission to leave his trousers on the floor and climb onto the bed to kneel at Fenris’ side.  
  
He’s pale compared to Fenris’ olive complexion on the best of days, but with Fenris still clad in his black leather jerkin and leggings, Anders feels washed out and translucent. It fits his feeling of unreality far too well when he puts his trembling ghost fingers to the black cord that closes Fenris’ leggings over the swell of his cock and fumbles for the simple secret of untying the knots.  
  
Ghosts can’t untie knots. Ghosts have no agency, they are only watchers.  
  
He has to stop, to close his eyes, to draw a deep breath and remember that before he was a ghost in his own mind, he had been a man who could sew together a wound with these same trembling fingers and never once fumble the needle or cause more pain that necessary. Compared to that, what are a few knots?  
  
He opens his eyes and keeps them down, not wanting to see whatever contempt might be on Fenris’ face. It’s an expression he knows well from the years of their acquaintance, but he thinks it will cut him too deeply now.  
  
When the knots finally give way under his fingers, Anders dares a glance up, finding Fenris’ eyes on him, but the only instruction that comes is in the tilt of his head and a raised eyebrow that gives him permission to be greedy for now.  
  
And greedy he is, tugging the laces open as gently as he can until he can see Fenris’ cock, lying straight and hard against his hip, lines pressed into the skin from the tight constriction of the leggings and laces. He is staring, lips parted to let his tongue draw a line over his lower lip remembering the taste of skin and precum, spring water and semen.  
  
Fenris jars him from his reverie by lifting his hips, hooking his thumbs under the top of his leggings at his hips and pushing them down to the tops of his thighs. Just enough to free himself from the leather, but no more.  
  
He is long and straight and hard, one vein standing out almost angrily along his shaft leading toward the head where his foreskin has already drawn back to reveal skin so taut and silken that Anders would half-expect it to shine with its own light. It would, if Danarius had seen fit to lay lyrium into Fenris’ cock, but apparently the inlay wasn’t vital to the design that had been drawn into the flesh of a once-willing slave.  
  
To Anders, seeing one part of Fenris untouched has a beauty and symmetry of its own. Impulsively, not waiting for Fenris’ direction, he braces a hand on the other side of Fenris’ hips and leans down to press a light kiss to the underside of Fenris’ shaft.  
  
Fenris briefly allows the kiss before sliding his fingers into Anders’ hair to pull him upright. “Later, when we bathe.”  
  
“Yes, Fenris,” Anders agrees readily. Later means more, and more means more time in which everything can come down to simple considerations.  
  
“Come here.” Fenris tugs his hair again, guiding him with his other hand to move to straddle his body, knees level with his ribs. When he bends with Fenris’ fingers guiding him down for a hungry kiss, his cock hangs between his legs and sways down to brush against Fenris’ shaft with a light touch that makes his hips jerk and his fingers tighten in the bedding.  
  
Fenris slips a hand between their bodies and closes his fingers around Anders’ cock for one long stroke to base to tip, gathering up the first bead of precum on his thumb before smoothing that down Anders’ shaft in a cool line that makes Anders shiver with eagerness. Yes to this, yes to anything, yes to everything. He can’t imagine a no leaving his lips.  
  
When Fenris trails his fingers down Anders’ shaft, his rolling hips give assent. When Fenris’ fingers stroke over his scrotum, and slip past that to press into the crease of his buttocks, Anders’ soft moan against his lips is his yes. And when Fenris says, “I’m going to fuck you,” of course all Anders says once he finds his voice is, “Yes, Fenris.”  
  
  
  
  
 **XXVI.**

The sunlight through the broken ceiling spills across Anders’ back with unexpected gentle heat, leaving his shoulders warmer than his lower body which lies in shadow. Fenris’ touch leaves more heat in its wake, down his shaft, over his scrotum, and when one finger slips between his buttocks to circle the tight ring of his anus, Anders’ whole body quivers in response. His thighs tremble with the effort of holding himself still, his shoulders suddenly feel as though the sunlight across them has real weight.  
  
He only realizes that his eyes have fallen closed when he opens them again to the sight of Fenris’ face, just inches away from his own. His expression is avid and his lips part to show the tip of his tongue against his lower lip just as he presses that one finger lightly inward, not enough to hurt when there’s nothing to ease its slide, but just enough that the pressure and promise of more to come forces a moan past Anders’ lips.  
  
When Fenris shifts his hand enough to press the ball of his thumb into his perineum, at first it’s just a pleasant pressure until Fenris rolls his thumb, seeking just the right spot, just the right pressure, and when he finds it, Anders eyes grow wide and the trembling turns to full-body shakes. Memories stir at the edges of his consciousness _(Karl’s face pressed tight against his neck as he pushes past that first burning…)_ , and fighting them back wins him a measure of control over his body, enough to still his trembling, enough to let him think of other things.  
  
There are other considerations, of course. No matter how willing Anders is, if Fenris takes him dry, something delicate between them will break, some fragile trust that hurt will not be harm, that care will be given and appreciated, some understanding that what Fenris offers Anders is what he himself once needed and never received.

For an instant, there is something in Fenris’ eyes that is cold and uncaring of those matters. His finger probes deeper and Anders squeezes his eyes closed and bites his lip to keep from making a sound, because if this is the price he has to pay…

Fenris grunts and draws his hand away. “When I was….”

Anders opens his eyes and waits for Fenris to finish, but Fenris says nothing for too long before he speaks again, sounding harsher for reasons Anders can’t fathom. “Some mages know a spell…” He raises his hand and rubs his thumb across his index and middle fingers. “Do you know it?”

It takes too long for Anders to pull himself out of his physical haze to understand what Fenris is requesting; long enough for Fenris’ expression to darken to a scowl as though he thinks that Anders is mocking him somehow. Of course he isn’t, but how can he explain that?

He can’t. He can only raise a hand, thumb and forefinger held apart as though to measure the distance between his mind and the brink of insanity, and let a spark of violet magic flow between the digits, leaving them coated in a magical slickness that has taken more than a few darkspawn feet out from under them in years gone by, and which he used to put to much better use in private moments.

He can feel Fenris’ brands respond to even this small use of magic with their bodies touching. Here in the sunlit spotlight under the open roof, he can’t see the lyrium light with power, but even someone less attuned to the touch of magic would have to feel the sing of it against bare skin. It jolts through him, leaving his thigh muscles tight and his mouth open on a silent gasp, but Fenris’ scowl only deepens as he pushes his brands’ power down.

“Don’t show off,” he says and grips Anders’ hips, fingers digging in over muscle and bone with a sharp flash of pain that brings all of Anders’ attention to the present. “Just make enough and open yourself for me.”

With a direct instruction, everything is much simpler, but Anders adds to the instruction to show that he’s thinking of Fenris’ comfort as much as Fenris is thinking of his. He widens his kneeling stance over Fenris until his knees no longer touch Fenris’ ribs, and braces one hand on the bed to ensure that their bodies are completely separated before he reaches back with the hand he had used to demonstrate the spell, slipping a slick finger inside himself with a shuddering indrawn breath.  
  
  
  
  
 **XXVII.**

It’s been years. It’s been a lifetime. It’s been too long since Anders last knelt over a man, spreading himself with slick fingers, working first one and then another into his body. It’s been too long since he felt this particular anticipation laying an electric web across his skin.

The sun is warm on his back, but he casts a shadow over Fenris that sways into a languid rhythm with the slow rise and fall of his shoulder as it translates the motion from his fingers and hand up his arm and through the rest of his body. He might be above Fenris physically, but he’s also the one who is fully exposed while Fenris lies composed and still under him, almost fully dressed, hands now resting lightly on his own stomach while he watches Anders work himself because of a few words from Fenris. _Open yourself for me._

Anders drags his lower lip between his teeth and struggles to keep his eyes focused on Fenris’ face when he presses a third finger into himself and channels a last lick of the inelegantly named but so very effective grease spell up over his fingers. When he pulls them away and draws them down Fenris’ cock to leave it glistening and slick, there can be no doubt that he has done his best to be obedient to Fenris’ will.

He waits, because now must be the time when Fenris will show him what he meant by _when I have you under me._ Surely Fenris will want Anders to move to let him up, or Fenris will pull him down and roll their bodies until he’s on top, or even tell him to go put his hands against the wall and spread his legs.

Because that’s how it’s done.

Isn’t it?

But Fenris only settles one hand on Anders’ thigh and wraps the base of his cock with the other, lifting it away from his body until the tip points up toward Anders. “Show me.”

There’s pressure on his thigh and clear expectation on Fenris’ face, and this is not what Anders expected; every time he thinks he knows what to expect, the rules seem to change. The pressure on his thigh increases and Fenris lifts his hips just enough for the tip of his cock to slip between Anders’ buttocks.

“Show me,” Fenris says, “that you’re ready.”

Anders sees what he’s doing, what he’s been doing all along. Fenris is willing to take, but only what he has been freely given. Even this. Maybe especially this, and the thought seems to plant the seed of something warm in Anders. It may not thrive in the cold it finds there, but Anders welcomes it nonetheless.

He sinks down, reaching back to lay his fingers down the length of Fenris’ shaft, guiding him until he can feel that delicate dividing line between “not yet” and “now.” There’s no burn, no pain, and no fear when he feels his body relax, open, and then _clench_ with Fenris inside him.

They both gasp, but when Anders sinks down on the length of Fenris’ cock, it’s Fenris who moans aloud, his entire body stiffening under Anders. Anders can see a thin line of white under the dark flicker of Fenris’ eyelashes before he opens his eyes and pins Anders in place with the force of his stare.

Fenris’ lips pull back from his teeth and he has time to feel a frisson of fear before the world becomes a confusion of motion – Fenris pulling him down, fingers in his hair, an arm around his back, and Fenris is pulling away only to drive his hips upward in a hard thrust that spins the whole world, that finally forces a cry from Anders’ lips, and then he is looking up at the open roof with Fenris pushing his legs apart and up toward his chest.

 _When I have you under me_ is now, and Anders is thinking of no one and nothing but Fenris. 

**XXVIII.**  
Fenris rises above Anders, backlit by the light coming in through the broken roof, making Anders squint to see his expression. His tooth-baring snarl has shuttered, turned inward in focus as he settles his hands on Anders’ thighs behind his knees and holds him in a tight curl, open to him.  
  
He slowly draws away and Anders whimpers, digging his fingers into the tangled bedding at his sides. Fenris holds them both there for a timeless eternity with Anders’ body clutching desperately around him to keep him from pulling out entirely. When he shifts and drives his hips forward, it forces the air out of Anders’ lungs on a sharp cry that turns into a wordless plea as Fenris draws out of him again one deliberate inch at a time, the head of his cock caught and held inside Anders’ body for another endless moment that has him struggling futilely against Fenris’ hold on his legs to raise himself up to take the length of him again.  
  
But this is all in Fenris’ time, on his rhythm, and at his will. His fingers are like steel, holding Anders in place in a position that gives him total control over Anders’ ability to move. He fucks Anders with the same excruciatingly calculated self-discipline he had used the night before in the bath. Anders can’t know what training has instilled this rigid control in Fenris, and doesn’t know if he should be grateful or aggrieved or even horrified.  
  
Soon enough with the continued rhythm of hard, deep penetration followed by equally slow withdrawal, Anders can’t think of anything but anticipation of the next breath-stealing plunge Fenris takes into his body. His thoughts are so utterly, perfectly distilled into physical sensation that they are also perfectly _whole._  
  
The dam between his thoughts and his voice breaks, spilling a torrent of words, simple words, simple thoughts. “I need you,” and “I need more,” and “Please” and “Please,” and _“Please,”_ and the words that finally break through, “I’m yours.”  
  
When Anders says those words, gives himself without being asked, Fenris’ body stutters out of another slow withdrawal and pauses before he buries himself in Anders’ body with a hard slap of flesh against flesh and curls forward to bring his face as close to Anders’ as their positions allow.  
  
Strands of white hair are sweat-glued to his forehead and temples, his olive skin is flushed dark, and his pupils are drowning deep. Anders is transfixed by the expression he sees there, a mix of surprise, covetousness, and possessiveness. _This is mine? I can have it? This is mine. I will never give it up._  
  
Fenris rocks against him and rasps, “Say that again.” _This is mine?_  
  
Anders frees his fingers from the blankets and wipes his thumb through the sweat beaded at Fenris’ temple. He has to answer quickly before his mind fractures simplicity into broken silence again. “I’m yours.”  
  
They’re pressed so tightly together he can feel the shudder roll through Fenris’ body before he pushes Anders into an even tighter ball in order to reach his lips, straining for a kiss before he’s pulling away, pulling out, and plunging back into Anders with a hard, fast slap of sweat-dampened skin on skin. _This is mine._ Again and again, until the bed is groaning its maltreatment and Anders is crying out wordless encouragement for more, for harder, for Fenris to let his control go.  
  
It’s beautiful to watch, even sun-dazzled and squinting; when Fenris’ control breaks in a frozen moment’s pleasure, he looks surprised and shattered and just for that moment, he looks like someone young and unscarred by what life has been for him.  
  
Then he’s letting Anders’ legs down, pulling them out straight and settling himself like a dead weight over Anders’ body, with his head on Anders’ shoulder and his lips against his neck to let Anders feel every panting breath while he tries to reassemble the scattered fragments of his self-control.  
  
Anders can feel his chuckle like a caress when he rolls his hips and Anders groans, his own need hot and seething in his balls, in his cock, even rippling across his skin as though following every line of lyrium Fenris has pressed against him where their bodies touch.  
  
“I haven’t forgotten you,” Fenris promises.  
  
  
  
  
 **XXIX.**  
Fenris’ breathing slows and Anders can feel him softening a fraction at a time, still making no move to withdraw. His body tightens every time he feels Fenris starting to slip away, as though he can will him back to hardness and start this whole exercise in control and its loss over again from the beginning. Each time he squeezes, Fenris grunts against Anders’ neck. Anders knows he must be hypersensitive in the minutes after orgasm, but he can no more help himself than he can tell the blood swelling his own cock to cool, to slow, to travel paths into his fingers or his legs rather than racing the length of his cock from tip to root and deeper until he thinks he will explode with his own need. He is hard and only growing harder as time passes, and as problems go, it’s a sweet one.  
  
Finally Fenris draws a deep breath that signals a transition. Everything changes with that breath, his lips shift up Anders’ throat to his jaw, a hand slides up Anders’ thigh to his hip, his weight lessens as he pulls himself together to dig his knees into the mattress and with a moment that is a stab in reverse, he slips free of Anders’ body.  
  
“Shh,” Fenris soothes him with a kisses to his jaw, to his chin, and then pressed against his lips while he shifts his weight to one elbow, insinuating  his free hand between their bodies to find the place he just vacated, fingers finding the slick of semen and magical lubrication, pressing in to force a gasp from Anders, his hips lifting to encourage Fenris to go deeper. “Shh.”  
  
Anders forgets thought again until Fenris murmurs, “Use your hand and I’ll use mine.”  
  
Maker, but the elf keeps taking him by surprise. Anders can’t keep up with the shift, with the words, with the _order_ until Fenris folds his fingers tight and presses three deep inside him, palm up to make the  subsequent _come hither_ stroke of his fingers pull a half-scream from Anders’ throat.  
  
Fenris is over him, and he doesn’t know how many times he hears “Your hand. Use your hand,” before he remembers himself enough to understand that he’s being given not just permission but a command.  
  
His hand should be too rough, his grip too hard, his stroke too fast, but it’s perfect, every last bit, because when he takes his cock in hand and squeezes, Fenris lights with power and magic and dear Maker _thelyriumsingsevenwithoutJustice_.  
  
And it all happens at once – the lyrium light, the crook of Fenris’ fingers inside him that leave him full and touch him where he needs to be touched and the low growl of Fenris’ approval and the touch of lyrium that sings through him to touch his magic and it’s all _too much!_  
  
Anders arches off the bed, eyes wide and blind and staring up into the white-blue sky without seeing a thing because his vision is turned inward.  
  
And when he collapses back on the bed, his hand sticky with semen, his eyes blinded by orgasm and sunlight, and his body trembling with the aftermath of the pleasure, Fenris leans up to catch his panting breaths for a kiss that steals away even his breath.  
  
It’s…  
  
Everything.  
  
  
  
  
  
 **XXX.**  
They should get up, clean up, probably even bathe, but the most Fenris manages is to snag Anders’ discarded trousers off the floor by the bed. He does a desultory job of wiping away the worst of the sticky mess they have made between them, and Anders offers only a feeble protest when Fenris swipes a rough pants leg over his genitals and between his legs; the cloth is too harsh on skin that is still too sensitive, but Fenris finishes quickly and tosses the trousers to the floor before stripping away his leather leggings and jerkin. When they're both equally naked, he lies down on his side, gathering Anders against him in the circle of his arms.  
  
“I have gone mad,” Fenris says in the tones of a man talking to himself from the edge of sleep. “I have gone mad and I am dreaming a world in which the abomination is no longer an abomination, stills his tongue, and does exactly what I say.”  
  
That much of it is a pleasant madness, Anders thinks. Let the world move on without them, and they can stay in this crumbling mansion with its hidden treasures like the bath chamber downstairs. Let them become two of the treasures, hidden like pearls in a shell. He will still his tongue and be Fenris’ obedient pet mage, for the safety of innocents and for some chance at peace for himself.  
  
He wriggles a little lower on the bed to put his face at chest level with Fenris and turns his head to rest his cheek on the swell of his pectoral. He can hear Fenris’ heart, beating fast but slowing by the moment as his body relaxes, he can smell sweat and semen and even the faintest not-quite-ozone tang of lyrium, Fenris’ skin is chilled at the surface by drying sweat, but burns underneath as though heated by his ever-present core of rage. He can close his eyes and still see blue-white light in luminous filigree painted against his eyelids.  
  
He thinks that if he is going to lose himself, there are worse places to be lost, crueler places, colder places. He carries those places with him everywhere he goes.  
  
“Still not going to say anything?” Fenris asks, idly ruffling his fingers through the hair on Anders’ arm. “Perhaps argue that you won’t do just _anything_ I say?”  
  
Anders shakes his head and gives a small shrug. What could Fenris tell him to do that he would say no to? He may not have liked Fenris in the past, may even have goaded him _(You’re jealous!)_ so many ways about so many things, but he trusts him not to use Anders’ power as poorly as Anders himself has used it. Which of them is the hypocrite now?  
  
Fenris makes a sound deep in his throat that rumbles through his chest and against Anders’ ear. “I almost wish for your old prattling ways right now.”  
  
Anders says nothing, and perhaps they have found the _almost_ of doing exactly what Fenris requires, because Anders cannot envision himself ever “prattling” again.  
  
“Do you play the lute?” Fenris asks, surprising him with the subject change.  
  
He shakes his head. He has many skills, but playing the lute is not among them.  
  
Fenris sighs, though surely that answer can’t come as much of a surprise. He’s heard Anders’ attempts at singing at the Hanged Man on the rare occasions Justice would let him drink….  
  
Justice.  
  
His fragile contentment drains away. He can feel his face crumple with grief, but Fenris is speaking again, and he clings to each word like a lifeline to keep from sinking only to discover that he’s clinging to falling stones.  
  
“You aren’t ready for this,” Fenris is saying, and Anders doesn’t know what “this” is, but if Fenris thinks he isn’t ready, he probably isn’t. “But you have to know, because we can’t stay naked in this bed forever. Hawke will come again, and you have to know what happened in the Gallows. What happened to Meredith. What happened to Bethany.”

 


End file.
